There is only one thing worse than missing out on tickets to see your favourite band.
It's seeing those same tickets on a secondary ticketing website moments later at three, four and even five times their original price.
Fans of Jerry Seinfeld, Crowded House, Adele, Justin Bieber, and most recently Midnight Oil have all lost out to automated ticket scalpers that snag tickets en masse, to sell at inflated prices.
Ticket scalping was so rife for The Oils' upcoming shows that additional performances were scheduled, while the band's manager called for new laws to ban the technology used by professional scalpers "to jump the queue and elbow real fans out of the way".
In 2000 "jump[ing] the queue" became Ken Lowson's bread and butter when he developed the first incarnation of a ticket bot at his former Los Angeles company Wiseguy Tickets.
At its peak, Wiseguy was buying up to 40,000 tickets a week in the US to sell to brokers. It made $25 million from 2002 to 2009, using a network of bots on multiple servers to skirt security measures and impersonate thousands of individual buyers.
But by 2010 the operation came undone when Wiseguy's practices were found to be fraudulent in the US District Court, and Mr Lowson and two colleagues narrowly avoided jail after pleading guilty to hacking and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
"But we didn't hack anything ... we just took advantage of what we knew about the internet to buy tickets better, using captcha. We were more nerds than ticket brokers."
Captcha is the software used by websites to verify that a user is human, which asks for a code to be entered or a pattern to be completed. But Mr Lowson said this was no barrier.
"I knew Ticketmaster was using only 30,000 captcha combinations, so I had my whole staff typing them out for 30 hours."
Mr Lowson has since "gone to the other side", starting a new company, Tixfan, which eliminates brokers and uses presales to market directly to fans and groups.
"Artists can hire me now, to take out my old competition."
A Ticketmaster spokeswoman said "millions" had been invested anti-bot technology, but maintained that stronger legislation and enforcement was needed in Australia, such as the Better Online Ticket Sales Act introduced by President Barack Obama in the US last year.
Lately it seems tickets for any major artist are all but guaranteed to sell out in minutes before appearing on secondary ticketing platforms such as Ticketmaster Resale, Viagogo and StubHub.
A common misconception is that scalping is illegal, however in NSW the practice is not prohibited, except in areas around the Sydney Cricket Ground, the Sydney Football Stadium, and Sydney Olympic Park precinct.
On Ticketmaster Resale Australia it is understood the majority of sellers are individual fans, who set the prices for their tickets.
But consumer group Choice says Australians continue to lose out to resale websites, prompting it to launch an international survey of the ticket resale market.
"From outrageous ticket price mark-ups of up to 327 per cent, to denying refunds and selling fake tickets, the time has come to say fair's fair and stop these resale websites ripping off consumers," said Choice spokesman Tom Godfrey.
In partnership with its overseas counterparts, Choice is surveying fans and industry representatives about their experiences with the ticket resale market.
A Ticketmaster Resale spokeswoman said the company welcomed "Choice's interest into the practices of secondary ticketing and we look forward to working with them ???"
Evelyn Richardson, the chief executive of peak body Live Performance Australia, said digital technology better enabled scalpers, yet there remained a legitimate role for [established] resale sites such as Ticketmaster Resale.
"However, we do not support some secondary market sites such as Viagogo, which operate offshore with much less transparency and accountability."
LPA is currently developing a code of practice for the secondary ticket market.
Ms Richardson expressed disappointment that the government did not back a motion by Senator Nick Xenophon last year, to prohibit ticket brokers from using bots.
"Action is underway in the UK and the US to deal with bots. Australia should follow suit as soon as possible."
Viagogo did not respond to Fairfax Media's request to comment.
